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AP Images/ Kaan Saganak ISTANBUL—As I finished checking into my hotel Sunday in Istanbul’s Sisli neighborhood, a few miles from the Taksim area that has been the epicenter of recent protests rocking Turkey, the hotel clerk, without being asked, pulled out and opened a city map. I expected the usual ritual: He would point out the key points of tourist interest, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the Hagia Sofia, the Grand Bazaar, and so on, and I would thank him. But he didn’t. Instead, he drew a circle around Taksim. “This is where the protests are,” he said, looking at me conspiratorially. “You going later?” I asked. “Yes,” he nodded. “We go every day.” The night before I arrived, in what many acknowledged was the worst night of violence yet, the police had descended on Gezi Park—the small green space next to Taksim Square whose imminent bulldozing sparked the protests initially—with water cannon and tear gas in an attempt to clear out protesters. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan...

AP Images/Gerald Herbert In February 2003, massive rallies were held worldwide— including one of some 200,000 people in Washington, DC—to protest the impending invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition. President George W. Bush’s response when asked whether the protests had influenced his thinking at all was to scoff at them, saying “It's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.” It was standard Bush. The decider had decided. And he had his political mandate: Polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans supported the war . The views of the minority could therefore be dismissed. I was reminded of Bush’s dismissal of protesters’ opinions this weekend, when I read of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s remarks on the protests that have engulfed his country over the past several days. Dismissing the protesters as “a bunch of looters” without a coherent message, Erdogan declared, “We will build a mosque in Taksim and we do not...

AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File P resident Barack Obama’s speech at the National Defense University last week represented the latest and probably most significant rhetorical shift away from the “war on terror” since he took office in January 2009. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said in one of the speech’s key passages. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” “Core al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” the president said. “ Groups like AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that label themselves al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.” Time will tell whether Obama puts real weight behind some of the changes articulated in the speech. There’s no question that it marked another important turn toward a more nuanced assessment of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. But like...

AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi I n testimony last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman made clear that the U.S. would continue to look for ways to raise the pressure on Tehran, even as it remained committed to a negotiated solution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program. But she also cautioned against steps that would foreclose diplomatic options or damage the international consensus that the administration has worked so effectively to forge. “As we move forward, it will be critical that we continue to move together and not take steps that undo the progress made so far,” Sherman said. Sherman was reiterating the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community: that the government of Iran, while continuing to move forward with its nuclear program and keeping its options open, has not yet made a decision to obtain a nuclear weapon. It shouldn’t be surprising that various members of...

AP Photo/Ariel Schalit F or those advocating greater intervention in Syria by the United States, the memory of Iraq has turned into a real inconvenience. “Iraq is not Syria,” proclaimed the headline of New York Times editor Bill Keller’s op-ed on Monday, by way of arguing for greater U.S. involvement in Syria’s ongoing civil war. Because of Iraq, Keller wrote, “in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.” Let’s grant that it’s possible to over-learn the lessons of Iraq. The Iraq war, as costly a blunder as it was, should not discredit any and all military interventions, but it should—and has—raised the bar for when such interventions are necessary. What appears to persist, however, is the belief that “bold” U.S. moves—nearly always assumed to be military action—can change the situation for the better, and produce the outcomes that we would like to see. And if those outcomes...